Subscribe

Subscribe

Democrats need to focus on ridding the nation of Trump

Richard Cohen
on Jul 9, 2019

The bevy of Democrats running for president seems determined to test my silent vow never to vote Republican, especially for Donald Trump. The truth is that I cannot imagine that happening, but I can imagine entering the voting booth with about a colonoscopy level of enthusiasm. Please, can we get this over with?

At the moment, the party is squabbling over what is called forced busing to achieve school desegregation. It seems the party has forgotten that, with the possible exception of the Civil War draft, no program has been more hated by working-class Democrats -- more whites than blacks, but plenty of blacks as well. In large American cities, busing was seen as an effort by liberals to send white kids to schools they would not, for a moment, send their own kids to. In Boston, the spiritual home of the anti-busing movement in the 1960s, the populace had not been as furious since George III bivouacked his unwashed Redcoats in the tidy homes of American patriots.

The leader of that anti-busing movement was Louise Day Hicks, a wife, a mother, a lawyer and a fearsome racist firebrand. She rode the movement clear into Congress, and she came close to becoming Boston's mayor, losing by only 20,000 votes. By then she had proved that busing was loathed in white, working-class America. Mobs formed in the streets, and the cops had to be called. Busing was sometimes the only remedy for school-board gerrymandering, which carved districts in such a way that schools were racially segregated. Since you could not move the schools, you had to move the kids. The law, not to mention equity, demanded it. Hicks and others, not to put too fine a point on it, did not give a damn about the law.

Busing as an issue eventually faded. It took Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., to revive it and remind us that Joe Biden was on the wrong side of the issue. Harris also reacted to the fact that Biden had made common cause with some of the Senate's more repugnant racists, such as James O. Eastland, D-Miss., in opposing busing. In a bit of prepared treacle at last month's debate, Harris told the story of a young black child who benefited from being bused to a better school. "That little girl was me," she said -- words that now appear on a T-shirt her campaign is selling for $29.99 and $32.99, depending on the size.

Harris' exhumation of busing was greeted over at Fox News with the delirium usually reserved for striking oil in one's own backyard. Laura Ingraham was almost at a loss for words as the Democrats endeavored to be the brain-dead party she always said they were. Then, to presumed great glee in Trumpland, Biden did not take Harris to task for a cheap shot, but employing his usual logorrhea, he meandered his way to an explanation that lacked, among other things, clarity. Should Biden become the Democratic nominee, he's going to have to answer for his party's sudden fondness for a loathed program no one has much discussed in years.

But the Democratic Party is on a tear. One by one, its candidates have embraced losing issue after losing issue. First came reparations for slavery, a noble idea lacking only popular support and practicality and possibly amounting to yet another attempt to right a wrong with money. Before that, the various candidates raised their hands in support of Medicare-for-All, which could strip millions of people of their private insurance plans. That is sure to be characterized by Trump as socialized medicine with the sick growing old and dying, covered in cobwebs while waiting to see the doctor. GOP strategists must be hyperventilating over all the goodies arrayed before them. This is a campaign even Trump could win.

The Democratic Party has a possibly fatal inability to prioritize. The urgent challenge is to rid the nation of Trump, not to mollify this or that identity group or wrestle over issues that could not be solved when they were relevant -- like busing. As it is, the candidates are campaigning in an America of their own imagination -- a bit to the left of Sweden and as racially unified as one of those old Coke commercials. They pander to the extremes of the early caucus and primary states, thinking they can seduce the middle later on down the road or, in my case, giving me a choice of one of them or Trump. Sedate me first.

========

Richard Cohen's email address is cohenr@washpost.com.

(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group

Share

More Richard Cohen

With the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, probably no woman has risen as high and fallen so far as Linda Fairstein, the one-time sex-crimes prosecutor now accused of railroading the convictions of five teenagers for a ...Read More

More than a year in Congress has not dimmed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's talent for flippant demagoguery. After helping to scuttle Amazon's move to New York City -- at a cost of about 25,000 jobs -- and confusing a tax ...Read More

I ask because reports regularly surface about Donald Trump berating or insulting someone, often an aide, who just takes it. A recent example comes from Michael Wolff's new book "Siege," in ...Read More

On one day last week, Joe Biden reaffirmed his support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the federal funding of most abortions. A day later, Biden reversed himself, giving as a reason the recent spate of draconian ...Read More

The late Richard Holbrooke was a liar. He was often disingenuous, betraying his friends as well as his lovers, flattering political gargoyles -- Jesse Helms, for instance -- and went everywhere protected by a posse of his ...Read More

If you are a Democrat -- or anyone -- opposed to Donald Trump, you can look back at the 2018 midterms for optimism. Democrats flipped 43 congressional seats, some in districts that had voted for Trump, and exit polls ...Read More